(From 2003?)
On a dry hilltop in the West Bank, there’s a kaffee klatsch one might be surprised to find anywhere in the world – Palestinian Arabs and American Jews, smoking, drinking coffee together and sleeping under the same roof. These are not crusty elites who might share a conference room at Harvard to sort out the problems of the Middle East, safe in the knowledge that no violence will take place at the table. These are Palestinian villagers who have lived 35 years under hostile Israeli control, many of whom have known no Jews besides soldiers and settlers. And these are Jews who have heard forever that Palestinians are barbaric, feudal and Jew-hating, and who, like the vast majority of American Jews, never met a Palestinian before coming to the West Bank.
Although just sitting together is groundbreaking, these Jews and Arabs are doing more than hanging out. They’re joining forces to combat a danger they’re convinced will destroy them both unless they confront it – Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and most urgently, the Separation Wall now blasting through Jayyous.
Jayyous is a small farming village in the West Bank, but it has the feel of the western United States. Its winding lanes are the kind that spring up organically, rather than the squarer kind made by planners. The white plastic arches of greenhouses line up on flat plots behind the school. A volleyball tournament caused a frenzy last month when Jayyous won the cup. Farmers sit together in the shade when their fields are too hot to work, talking about water, crops and fences. They strategize about avoiding starvation.
The town’s olive groves and fruit orchards start just behind the last house; the fields stretch into the horizon. 100 yards from the house there’s a deafening clatter. A steam shovel rears its scoop above the treeline, then lowers it to bite away pieces of Palestinian ancestral farms. Without looking up, the farmers know the steam shovel is flanked by Israeli guards-for-hire carrying automatic weapons. They know the guards, Israeli Jewish men with no love for Palestinians and no consequences for killing them, are peering through rolls of razor wire strung in piles through the groves, looking for movement. They know the guards shoot.
This is the Separation Wall, also called the Apartheid Wall by those who understand its purpose to be exclusion rather than separation. Although it runs many kilometers inside the West Bank, it’s often referred to as a "border." Israeli official sources call it a "security fence," but even George Bush called it a wall – and a problem.
The most immediate problem is that the Separation Wall has separated Jayyous’ farmers from 70% of their fields, and nearly all of their irrigated land. The land on the other side is now effectively, militarily, Israel.
“The deleterious effects of the wall on Jayyous are incalculable. The trees on the land have a sacral meaning to the villagers; I've seen them cry over their destruction like relatives that've been killed,” says David Bloom, a New Yorker, journalist and Jewish activist against the occupation. Bloom is living in Jayyous for the summer, helping organize demonstrations against the Wall, and maintaining links with other internationals working in the West Bank.
“Seventy percent of Jayyous residents rely on agriculture for their livelihood, and the Israeli confiscation of their lands is in effect marching orders for them, as there is no other work to be had. It's a shattering experience to watch these people get so screwed.”
There are other problems with the Separation Wall, too. Aside from the destruction of thousands of dunams of fields in the Wall’s path and the regular beatings of Palestinians by security guards and soldiers patrolling the Wall, it launches a huge wrench into the peace process. And it doesn’t even get a mention in the Road Map. Its impact on survival in Palestinian villages is so intense that one of them – the Wall or the villages – will have to go. But when Palestinian farmers met with their U.S.-approved Prime Minister Abu Mazen to demand the Wall be addressed in negotiations with Israel, Abu Mazen told them not to expect too much. It’s not in the Road Map, so it’s not a priority at the table.
“The wall is an unwritten order for emigration for Palestinians,” says Shareef Omar of the Palestinian farmer-led Land Defense Committee. “Why? The Wall is to confiscate our land and our well water. If they didn’t want to do that, they would build the Wall along the Green Line, and not six kilometers into our land. All our resources and water are now behind the Wall. And because of this, we are convinced that when Sharon gets the chance, he will close the gate. Without resources and without water, we can’t go on with life. We will have to leave the village just to continue living.”
Indifference to the overwhelming reality of the Wall seems epidemic among those engaged in the official Peace Process. It’s not a great surprise about Abu Mazen, who signed up to the Road Map because nothing else was on offer, and is now perversely obligated to hold it above the demands of his constituents. And it’s not a surprise about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, because the Separation Wall is his concession to his government coalition; he’d rather have the option of annexing the entire West Bank. But it is a surprise to find so much of the Israeli left still strumming the tinny note that good fences make good neighbors. It speaks to Israel’s narrowing political spectrum, in which the left sounds like the right, and dissenters are sweepingly branded “radicals.”
In fact, Israel’s Left, once defined at least by a tenuous relationship to a labor movement, has been reduced to an empty designation meaning only "people who mention peace." Bumper stickers plastered on thousands of cars read "The people want peace!" illustrating the strange contradiction of a country where voters overwhelmingly chose the hawkish Likud party. So, peace for whom? In Israel, "wanting peace" may mean anything from the NIMBY wish that Palestinians would just stop being a problem, to the peace of apartheid, which wants to cleanse Israel of Palestinians – and sure, give them a state they can go to. It almost never means sitting down with Palestinians to figure out how everyone involved can find both security, that much-repeated buzz word, and the less-mentioned self-determination. Only a handful of Israeli groups actually cross the Green Line to meet Palestinians locked in by the occupation. Doing so positions them as “radicals.”
The lack of Israeli-Palestinian communication is more serious than a missed nicety. It’s a symptom of the ethnic “separation” which Israel says is essential to its existence as a Jewish state. And Palestinians and Israelis working for peace – rather than a stalemate between their governments – are stymied by it. Mohammad in Jayyous watches nervously as the American Jews staying with him depart for Tel Aviv. It’s a half-hour trip he doesn’t get to take, to a city whose skyscrapers he can see from his roof. Anywhere Palestinians travel, even inside the West Bank, they can be stopped by an Israeli soldier for any reason, or no reason. They can be stripped of their identity papers, turned back or detained indefinitely – and those are just the things that can happen officially. Unofficially, Palestinians are beaten, harassed and tortured by soldiers in the way especially sadistic boys might torture an animal. It’s dangerous for Mohammad to leave home and illegal to cross the Green Line. He can’t get to the Israelis he’d like to talk with.
And though there are Israeli groups working with Palestinians, apartheid yokes them too. What are the structures of Palestinian grassroots organizing? Reading the papers, the average Israeli learns there isn’t any Palestinian movement besides Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the like. When Israeli activists do link up with organizers inside the Occupied Territories, their physical separation presents another hurdle. Aside from the historic fear between Israelis and Palestinians which demands a tentative approach to coming into each others’ spaces, Palestinian organizations are in upheaval following two years of Israeli-imposed 24-hour curfew which effectively shut many of them down. In addition, existing contacts are needed to make new contacts, since times are just too uncertain for cold-calls between Israelis and Palestinians.
So American Jews, having traveled 3000 miles to Jayyous, find themselves serving an odd function on this day: making links between Jayyous and the Israeli activists who live a taxi ride away. The Americans on their way to Tel Aviv are meeting with Israeli anti-occupation groups. Mohammad sends word that Jayyous wants to make contact with Israelis, make alliances. "I’ve wanted to work with Israeli activists," he says, "It’s so important for us to work together, because we are the ones who have to have peace together. But I don’t have a way to reach them." On the other end, Israeli activists ask the Americans, "Are you sure this village wants to work with Israelis?" Because some Palestinian villages, where non-violent organizers have been targeted for harassment, violence and disappearance by the Israeli army, feel they simply can’t take the risk. But in Jayyous the link has been forged, a victory against separation.
Like all apartheids, the one between Palestinians and Israeli Jews exists inside them as well as between them, deliberately cast into racial identity. But truth is far more complex than "Arab" and "Jew." About a third of the Israeli Jewish population is Mizrahi, or Eastern, meaning their families came from Arab or Muslim countries and were thoroughly Arab-identified. For thousands of years, their forbears spoke Arabic and Judeo-Arabic. No one in their bloodline ever uttered a word in Yiddish. Brought by European Zionists in the 1950s to settle Israel, Mizrahim are among Israel’s poorest residents, experiencing entrenched discrimination. In a country where social status is often predicated on whether your family helped establish the state, Jews who arrived after1948 (as did most Mizrahim) are permanently outside the golden circle. The overlap of Arab and Jewish identities is a major social problem for a country whose foundation myth is purely European, and fundamentally white.
Sami Shalom Chetrit is a writer and a founder of the Mizrahi Jewish movement, most recently producing “The Black Panthers (In Israel) Speak,” a documentary on Israel’s Mizrahi movement by the same name; the Israeli Black Panthers paralleled the U.S. Black Power movement in its demands to strip racist institutions of their hegemonic control. But Chetrit also works to deconstruct the politics of his own community, unraveling the threads of racism in Israeli society that tie discrimination against Mizrahim to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
“There is no way for a Mizrahi, an Arab Jew, to have an identity equal to an Ashkenazi Israeli but to erase his or her own identity constantly,” says Chetrit. “Because if you stop doing that, if you rest for a while, your Arabness is going to jump out again. And we don’t want that to happen! So the easiest way to do it – to erase your Arabness – is to erase some Arab. And that’s easy.”
Increasingly, Mizrahi Jews are battling racial privileging of Ashkenazi Zionists who form the core of Israel’s founding mythology. It’s a tall order even for those with "mainstream" privilege; white-skinned Jews of Zionist lineage – to oppose the elevation of the founders is to pit oneself not only against the government, but a central Israeli value. And for those outside the mainstream, the pressure to assimilate is intense. Not surprisingly, then, Arab Jews are demographically more hostile toward Palestinians than the general population, and further right on the Israeli political map. They’re joined on the right by new immigrants in pursuit of assimilation, including over a million Russians. Israeli human rights activists tend to be Ashkenazi, meaning European Jews, and non-immigrants, whose opposition to the Occupation doesn't pose a threat to their Israeli racial identity.
American Jewish activists identify the same phenomenon in the United States, where support for Israel often supercedes other, older, Jewish identities. Jews who question Israeli policy or the occupation are often branded "traitors.” Even among those who do oppose the occupation, many are quick to identify as supporters of Israel.
"There’s this intense alienation among many Jews who oppose the occupation," says Daniel Lang/Levitsky a Jewish community organizer in NewYork City. "They feel this need to say ‘but I’m still a Zionist!’ to bring themselves back into the Jewish mainstream. Because support for Israel is now understood to be identical with Jewishness. Not justice, not engagement with Jewish history and traditions, just unquestioning support for the Israeli government."
Last May, Lang/Levitsky protested at New York City’s Salute to Israel parade, with the New York City group Jews Against the Occupation and a coalition of anti-occupation organizers, against blanket acceptance of the Israeli policy of occupation. Parade-goers, including hundreds carrying peace signs, were outraged by the demonstration. But many seemed most enraged at the sight of the Jewish protesters, hurling accusations of treason. The experience was not a new one for Daniel Lang/Levitsky. “The reduction of Jewish identity to Zionism is nearly complete in the United States. There’s no longer a dialogue between Jews who think one thing and Jews who think another. At this point, dissenters struggle to be heard at all. Ironically, the escalation of the Israeli occupation is finally making it easier to point out that this is terribly wrong."
From the Separation Wall, to race and class struggle of Jews inside the Green Line, to American Jews’ worship of a European Israel, activists for peace and human rights battle denial across the Israeli landscape. "We encounter many people, many Jews, who tell us there’s no room for these memories," says Yosefa Mekyton, an Israeli Jewish activist with Zochrot. Zochrot, whose name is a feminized form of the Hebrew “remembering,” is translating memories of Palestinians’ 1948 expulsion from Arabic into Hebrew, hoping to undo their erasure from Israeli consciousness. "They tell us that remembering deportation of Palestinian Arabs, the destruction of over 500 villages, the violence Jews did in order to empty and control the land, is simply incompatible with our existence as we know it. And it's true in a way, because our existence as we know it is built on the erasure of those memories. If we want to live together, we have to acknowledge that something terrible, disastrous, has happened; we have come together to tell the stories."
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